The term AI Winter, first appeared in 1984 having been discussed at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. This discussion then saw a ri

AI Experts Discuss The Possibility of Another AI Winter

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2021-09-09 23:00:05

The term AI Winter, first appeared in 1984 having been discussed at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. This discussion then saw a rise in pessimism and a reduction of funding. Many minds that had survived the first 'winter', prior to it being cited as such, suggested that an increase in enthusiasm for AI, perhaps without the technical capabilities to match, has seen a sharp rise and later collapse. Having hit extreme lows in the early 1990s, the enthusiasm for AI began to rise again, and as they say, the rest is now history with it now so ubiquitous in society.  

That said, we have seen this year that anything is certainly possible, therefore, we thought we would ask our community of AI expert friends what they thought on the topic, asking - 'Do you think we will see another AI Winter? If so, why?

I don't think we'll see one in the same sense that we saw AI winters before, simply because AI technology is already so ubiquitous and has been demonstrated to work well in so many areas. This is in the realm of narrow AI, such as algorithms that can perform a narrow task incredibly well, like image classification/generation or machine translation. And I don't think there's any danger of deep neural networks going away anytime soon, as time and time again we've seen the power of combining vast amounts of data with very powerful machines to train these huge models. General AI, or AGI, is still not too well-defined, so I think it's been hyped up a bit with people's preconceptions from, say, movies and popular culture. I think there might be a bit of disillusionment after a while when it becomes obvious that general artificial intelligence won't necessarily look like that.

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